Better Living Through Biking

By Gavin Hudson

Imagine that you could wiggle your nose and magically get a quarter of a million dollars (yes, $250,000), better health, great legs and buns (your own), a sharper mental edge, easy parking everyday and an enjoyable commute, and maybe a couple new friends for good measure. What if these benefits also came with better air to breathe, less daily stress and more fun, less air pollution, safer streets, and more time spent outdoors?

To get all of these benefits, you don’t really have to wiggle your nose. In fact, if you can wiggle your nose, then please teach me how. All you have to do is to use a bicycle to get around.

From Paris to Portland, bicycling is catching on as one of the best methods of transportation for commuting, running errands, and just plain getting around town. Some bicyclists have even installed batteries on their vehicle, making it an electric "hybrid bicycle." Bicycling is ideal for trips of about 5-20 roundtrip miles; and for experienced bicyclists, even a trip of 50-miles or more is an enjoyable way to spend several hours getting from point A to point B.

Some companies, like Starbucks, are also recognizing the trend and are starting to offer their employees benefits for bicycling or taking public transit instead of driving.

Here is more information about some of the many personal, environmental, and social benefits that can be harnessed from your two-wheel wonder.

Personal Benefits

Your Wealth
According to Motor Trend and the American Institute for Economic Research, the average American car-owner can expect to pay between $240,704 and $349,968 during his driving lifetime. These figures will increase with the price of fuel and the rising cost of the vehicles themselves.

A bicycle can serve your transportation needs for commuting, shopping, and getting around town. Urbanites who are well acquainted with the frustration of paying parking tickets and towing fines will also find that bicycles are an excellent solution. Of course, you’ll still need that fuel: the occasional sandwich or cup of coffee will do nicely.

Your Health
Using a bicycle as your primary or secondary form of transportation is an excellent way to stay active. Cycling provides aerobic exercise, which burns calories, shapes leg and gluteal muscles and improves cardiovascular health. Health experts attribute current soaring rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity largely to a sedentary lifestyle. Bicycling is an excellent and often needed solution to these and other health issues.

In addition to the exercise that bicycling provides, bicycle commuters find that they are exposed to much less stress traveling by bicycle than by car. Bicycle commuters also report arriving awake and refreshed to work. And, as the Department of Health and Human Services reminds us, “exercise is related to positive mental health as indicated by relief in symptoms of depression and anxiety.”

Cycling is also a favorite way to enjoy the outdoors and gain an appreciation of nature. Benefits of bicycling in the outdoors include immersion of the traveler in his/her surroundings, the ability to appreciate the scenery and the ability to pull over at any time to for a closer look or a romantic moment when bicycling with a sweetheart.

In a sobering perspective on health, over 42,000 people die each year (1 million, worldwide) in the United States and some 2.8 million are injured as a result of automotive accidents. Another 70,000 lives are claimed each year in this country from medical conditions associated with air pollution (3 million, worldwide). Therefore, for personal safety and the health and safety of others, giving up the car keys is extremely important. As anyone who has experienced a car accident will tell you, car crashes can happen to anyone, not just bad or drunk drivers.

The good news is that studies indicate that bicyclists breathe in less air pollution, making cycling an even more healthy activity. Of course, bicycles emit no air pollution themselves, which ensures cleaner air and better lung health for everybody.

For traffic safety, it is also important that bicyclists following the rules of the road and cycling defensively and politely are important ways to avoid collisions, the most dangerous of which can occur with automobiles.

Environmental Benefits
Bikes get an infinite number of miles to the gallon of gas. Now that’s hard to beat! Bicycling emits no greenhouse, ozone, or any gasses of any sort. Cycling, therefore, is an excellent way for all of us to stand up to Global Warming, ozone thinning, acid rain, and other negative effects of air pollution that come in part from automobiles. If everyone biked or rode on public transit instead of driving, we could instantly cut 30% of the nation’s air pollution in a single stroke.

Bicycles also require smaller streets. By improving city planning to include more bike paths and fewer streets, more room is left as open space to beautify the city and protect the environment.

Social Benefits
One cannot overlook the social benefits of bicycling, both locally and around the world.

Locally
Healthy individuals are more apt to lead healthy social lives. Parents can help their children to stay healthy by teaching them to bicycle and thereby exposing them to outdoor exercise. Also, there are few more memorable a moment for children and parents alike than when a parent teaches his or her child how to ride a bicycle.

In communities, bicycles help to calm traffic by reducing the number of cars on the road. If you’re ever experienced road rage when driving behind a group of bicycles or a transit bus, just imagine how much more traffic it would create to place each cyclist or bus passenger in a car and place them on the road. Bicycling saves space and helps to reduce traffic.

Bicycling also encourages closer communities. Urban sprawl, which decreases property values, harms the natural environment and forces people to commute increasingly far distances for work, is a result of our dependence on cars. By contrast to North America, most European cities are built so that citizens can easily walk or bicycle from home to work or the grocery store. Bicycling discourages sprawl and encourages close-knit communities and better city planning as well as neighborhood stores and community centers.

Bicycling allows people in the community to easily stop, wave and greet one another as well as other passersby. This creates healthier, friendlier, happier neighborhoods.

Most cities and some states are also home to bicycle advocacy groups, which lobby to add bicycle lanes, improve roads, promote education about bicycling, and support clean air initiatives. These groups generally also offer a wonderful and vibrant sense community for bikers with regular social events and advocacy opportunities. Some examples of bicycle groups such as these are the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, MassBike (Massachusetts), the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and Bike New York.

Internationally
In countries like the United States, fossil fuels maintain a strong grip on the national economy and psyche. Access to oil is a strong incentive for territorial conflicts and even large international wars. It has been widely suggested, for example, that access to oil was one of the key motivators behind the U.S. invasion of the country of Iraq. Bicycling removes the incentive for these violent conflicts, thus helping to cure what has become known in the United States as an "addiction to oil."